The brigandine protected the torso with many small overlapping plates hidden beneath a textile or leather outer layer.
A brigandine is a body defence of many small iron plates riveted inside a fabric cover, most often a stout canvas faced with velvet or another fine textile. The plates are invisible; what shows is the cloth and the ordered rows of rivet heads, frequently gilded.
It is the coat of plates taken to its logical end: more plates, smaller, and therefore far more flexible. Where a coat of plates has a dozen or so, a brigandine may have hundreds, and the resulting garment moves with the body almost like heavy cloth.
It was worn from the late fourteenth century into the sixteenth by an unusually wide social range — infantry, archers, men-at-arms, and wealthy men who wanted armour that looked like clothing.
The cover is made first as a garment, then the plates are laid inside in overlapping rows and riveted through from the outside. Because each plate is small and each row overlaps the next, the assembly flexes freely in one direction while remaining rigid against a blow.
The rivets are the decoration as well as the fastening. Gilded or latten-headed rivets in ordered rows across coloured velvet made the brigandine a conspicuous garment, and surviving examples show real care taken over the pattern the heads describe.
Most open down the front and fasten with buckles or lacing, and many have separate shoulder pieces or skirts of the same construction. The best are shaped to the torso with tailored panels, which is what distinguishes an expensive brigandine from a serviceable one.
It gives most of the protection of a breastplate with far more freedom of movement, which is why it appealed to anyone who had to march, shoot or climb rather than sit a horse. Archers and billmen in particular are shown in brigandines throughout the fifteenth century.
The overlapping plates handle a cut easily and resist a thrust well, though not as well as a solid breastplate: a point arriving between rivets can spread the plates apart where a single shaped plate would have turned it.
Its social range is its most interesting feature. The same construction served a common soldier in plain canvas and a captain in crimson velvet with gilt rivets, and the difference between them was covering and tailoring rather than protection.
Its strengths are flexibility, concealment and comfort. It distributes weight across the whole torso rather than hanging from the shoulders, and it can be worn under a coat, which matters in a period when going armed in a town was often regulated.
Its limitation is that the fabric does the structural work. When the cover rots or the rivets corrode the whole thing falls apart, and a garment whose plates were sound may still be useless — which is why so few survive with their covers intact.
It is also inferior to plate against the heaviest weapons. Against a poleaxe or a war hammer the many small plates transmit force where a shaped breastplate would deflect it, so the fully armoured man-at-arms of the fifteenth century still preferred plate for the torso.
The type emerges in the later fourteenth century from the coat of plates, driven by the same demand that produced articulated plate elsewhere on the body: protection that moves.
It becomes ubiquitous in the fifteenth century, worn on every side of the period's fighting — in the Hundred Years' War, in the Italian wars, and by the retinues that fought the English civil wars of the later century.
It survives into the sixteenth century, by which time it has largely become infantry equipment as plate harness becomes the preserve of the wealthy and firearms begin to change what body armour is expected to stop.
Italian workshops dominated production and export, and Italian brigandines set the standard for both construction and finish. Northern examples are often plainer, though the difference is one of covering rather than of the plate work beneath.
The Metropolitan Museum of Art and the Royal Armouries hold examples with their coverings substantially intact, which are rare and valuable precisely because the textile survived. Far more common are sets of loose plates whose garment has gone entirely.
A recurring hazard in identification is that a brigandine, a coat of plates and a jack of plate can look similar in a painting, and the differences — plate size, plate count, whether the plates are riveted or sewn — are largely invisible from outside.